“I have agreed to give this talk today because I am still amazed at how much misunderstanding there is about the current system of health care, how it works, how it compares with what other people in other countries pay for health care and what kind of results they get and what changes are actually occurring now and are going to occur in the future,” he said.

Clinton was speaking in front of a small audience of doctors and health care professionals, but his audience was clearly the media and thousands watching the livestream of the speech online.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released the last week of August revealed that 51 percent of people polled said they “don’t have enough information about the Affordable Care Act to understand how it will impact them and their family,” and 44 percent were confused about or unaware of the current status of the law.

The former president noted that America is first “by a country mile” in the share of gross domestic product we spend on health care, at 17.9 percent. Yet our results are somewhere around 25th — at best — in the world.

He suggested our economy could be transformed if we could reduce that share to the 12 percent of GDP Switzerland and the Netherlands devote to health care.

“The difference between 17.9 percent and 12 percent is $1 trillion a year,” he said. “A trillion dollars that could go to pay raises, or to hire new employees or to make investments that would make our economy grow faster or to provide more capital to start small businesses or to expand others or to support diversifying and strengthening agriculture. You name it. A trillion dollars is a lot of money to spot our competitors in a highly competitive global economy.”

Obamacare is the best way to begin this transformation, he argued.

“It’s better than the current system, which is unaffordable and downright unhealthy for millions of Americans,” he said.

At the beginning of next month, Obamacare’s open enrollment begins as state marketplaces allow millions of Americans to choose from newly regulated plans. Tens of millions of Americans who earn up to 138 percent of the poverty level will become eligible for Medicaid in states that have chosen to expand the program, and an estimated 26 million Americans will discover that they are eligible for tax credits to help them pay for insurance.

Clinton touted the benefits of the law that are already in place that have allowed students to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, along with reforms that require insurance companies not consider pre-existing conditions for 17 million kids. In addition, more than 100 million Americans have seen the lifetime caps on their insurance policies disappear.

He also debunked one of the biggest lies from the right, that the law is leading to an epidemic of employers cutting workers to part-time, by noting that 90 percent of the jobs created since the law passed have been full-time.

“This law has already done a lot of good,” Clinton said. “It’s about to make 95 percent of us insured with access to affordable care. It has built-in incentives to lower costs and improve quality.”

Clinton’s affection for the law and the progress it promises was obvious, as he noted that it was more than a century ago when President Theodore Roosevelt first proposed that health care should be available to all Americans.

The former president — who began his first term in office with a failed attempt to reform the health care system — has used the analogy between Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt to describe how he feels about President Obama and the successful passage of the Affordable Care Act. He noted in 2009 that many of the things Theodore Roosevelt recommended “were not actually done until his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, became president, you know, more than 20 years later.”

But Clinton was also honest about improvements that need to be made to the law. He cited requirements for low-wage workers to cover their entire family or face penalties, along with complications created when the Supreme Court made it easy for states to opt out of Medicaid expansion.

He noted that though the House GOP has obsessively voted to repeal the law without presenting an alternative, other Republicans on the state and local levels have been working to implement the law properly. He cited Arkansas as example of how bipartisan cooperation can make the reforms work.

“You can’t change a complex ecosystem like American health care this much without creating some problems,” he said. “So there are some. But they can best be solved if we all work together to fix them.”

Photo: World Economic Forum via Flickr.com

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With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>